History is full of violence, cruelty, injustice, and the triumph of the strong over the weak, wherein the end seemed to justify the means; yet never since the world began did physical might alone make moral right. The sheriff and the hangman have made the doctrine unpopular among individuals--the ethical sense of mankind will in time make it equally unpopular among nations. Nature is not moral; primitive biological laws are not moral; they are unmoral. There is no moral law until it is born of human intercourse; then it becomes more and more a biological law, more and more prominent in social and national progress. The law of the jungle begins and ends in the jungle; when we translate it into human affairs, we must take the cruelty of the jungle out of it, and read it in terms of beneficent competition. Man is the jungle humanized; the fangs and claws are drawn, and the stealthy spring gives place to open and fair competition. II In the Darwinian struggle for existence there is first the struggle with environment, or with the non-living forces--heat, cold, storm, wind, flood; the organic always at war with the inorganic out of which its power comes. The fateful physical and mechanical forces go their way regardless of the life that surrounds them and which draws its energy from them. Gravity would pull down every tree and shrub and every animal that walks or flies. The wind and the storm would flatten down the flowers and grasses and grains like a steam roller, and often succeeds in doing so. See the timothy and wheat and corn struggle to lift themselves again. Behold how the trees grip the rocks and soil, and brace themselves against the wind! This struggle is, of course, not a conscious one. Apart from the original push of life, it can all be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. The bio-chemist will tell you why the plant leans toward the light, and why it rights itself when pressed down; but why or how matter organizes itself into the various living forms is a question before which natural philosophy is dumb. Neither chemistry nor physics can give us the secret of life. The ingenious devices to secure cross-fertilization among certain plants, devices for scattering the seed among others,--the hooks, the wings, the springs,--to me all seem to imply intelligence, not apart from, but inherent in, the things themselves. Power of adaptation--to take advantage of wind and flood, of solid and fluid--is one of the mysterious attributes of life. And yet we know that vegetable life takes advantage of these things not, as we do, by forethought and invention, but by a mysterious inherent impulse. How the bee and the bird battle with the wind, the fish with the waves and the rapids, the fur-bearers with the cold and the snow! how all living creatures struggle to escape or resist the dissolving power of the natural forces!